Recorded audio interviews (podcast) with leading figures in the blogsphere

What's this all podcast thing about?

My name is Roy Osherove (I also have a weblog) and I'm the principal of Team Agile, the company hosting this interview page. We provide training and consulting on software development best practices and Agile Development. We also do .NET architecture and development work. Learn more here.

Every once in a while I come across the opportunity to talk with a person who has done or has written interesting things that every developer I know should listen and learn from. If I'm lucky, they let me record them while we talk, and the results are then posted on this page. The people I interview are mainly technological-style people, although that does not have to be the case.

Want to be interviewed?
If you feel you have something important to share with the community, something you're an expert at, and feel that everyone can learn a thing or two from you, see our interviewee guidelines.

The Interviews

Johanna Rothman - Secrets of great management (01/12/05)

Johanna Rothman keeps coming back to Israel to teach management courses and consult and, well , I just love talking to her so much I keep asking her to do more and more interviews with me. Amazingly, she agrees every time. This time Johanna talks about topics from her new book out with Esther Derby - "Behind Closed Doors : Secrets of Great Management": Learning to delegate, coaching effectively, giving effective feedback, what makes for effective meetings, Solving problems and some planning tips.

If you've listened to any of the other interviews with Johanna (listed lower on this page) this is a nice take off from some of the topics Johanna has talked about in the past. This time we are concentrating more on the managerial side of things - things any new team lead or project lead needs to hear and read about.

After almost 8 months of scheduling nightmare, I've finally had the pleasure of having a great conversation with noted author and speaker, Kent Beck. This is more of a conversation rather than an interview. The conversation revolves around (but not limited to) the following subjects: Kent's upcoming book, "Implementation Patterns", Is Agile just another fad? What is Appreciative Inquiry? Why is the 1st edition of "XP Explained" totally wrong and misleading in its attitude, and what makes the 2nd Edition better? When does Pair Programming break and how does Kent feel about the book "XP Refactored"? All these and more topics in this intriguing conversation.

There is much more we wanted to talk about, but Kent felt this would make for a nice "first iteration". Post your comments on this interview in this blog post and let us know what you'd like to hear about, or whether you agree or disagree with the topics in this conversation. We'll take all these into account during a future conversation we will record.

KENT BECKKent is the founder and director of Three Rivers Institute. He has pioneered patterns for software development, the xUnit family of testing frameworks, the HotDraw drawing editor framework, CRC cards, refactoring, and most recently Extreme Programming. He is the author of Extreme Programming Explained, Planning Extreme Programming, and The Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns. He lives on 20 acres in rural southern Oregon with his wife, five children (one sadly now gone to college), four dogs, two sheeps, and a variable number of domestic fowl.

David Platt and Juval Lowy - Why Software Sucks And Other Architectural Insights

What do you ask when you get two software legends in one place? High level, world shattering questions, of course. Listen to this semi-serious chat mostly between Juval and David as they discuss matters such as Why software today sucks, Rich Client Vs. the browser, ClickOnce and unprotected sex (you heard correctly), the anthology of TLAs, how to know you're a geek, their upcoming books, top things to watch out for in .NET 2.0, where is software architecture heading, top 3 things every .NET developer should have done by now, Platt's laws of the universe and much more discussion, jokes and good ol' geeky fun. Truly a one of kind human experiment, is all I can say about this one.

Juval Löwy is the founder of IDesign and its Chief Architect. Juval is a seasoned software architect specializing in system architecture and large applications design. Juval helps IDesign customers design scaleable, robust, reusable, and extensible Enterprise applications, verifying that the customer has the design it takes to achieve the required quality, scalability, security, availability and throughput goals. Juval is Microsoft’s Regional Director for the Silicon Valley, working with Microsoft on on helping the industry adopt .NET. Juval also participates in the Microsoft internal design reviews for future versions of .NET. Juval is a frequent speaker at the major international software development conferences, where he talks about .NET, component-oriented design and development process. Click here for complete list of conference talks by Juval. Juval authored Programming .NET Components by O’Reilly. The book is dedicated to component-oriented programming and design using .NET, as well as the related system issues, such as remoting, threading and security. Juval also authored COM and .NET Component Services: Mastering COM+ a book which talks at length about the challenging topic of .NET Enterprise Services. Juval published numerous articles, regarding almost every aspect of developing with .NET. Click here for complete article list by Juval, as well as links to the articles. Microsoft recognized Juval as a Software Legend as one of the world top .NET experts and industry leaders.

David S. Platt (the guy on the right) teaches Programming .NET at Harvard Universityand at companies all over the world. He was selected by Microsoft as one of their Software Legends, which you can read about at www.softwarelegends.com. He has taught classes on ACORD insurance standards since the very first OLifE class in 1995. He is the author of eight programming books, most recently Introducing Microsoft .NET, 3rd Edition from Microsoft Press, with three more on the way. It is currently outselling Tom Clancy's Every Man a Tiger on Amazon.com, which tells you what kind of geeks buy their books there. "He's the only guy I know that can actually make an article on COM's apartment threading model funny," said Tana Sabatino.

Dave holds the Master of Engineering degree from Dartmouth College. He did his undergraduate work at Colgate University. When he finishes working, he spends his free time working some more. He wonders whether he should tape down two of his daughter's fingers so she learns how to count in octal. (Check them, has he done it yet?) He lives in Ipswich, MA.

Juval Lowy - Project Planning and Tracking (24/8/05)

Juval was invited to speak to the Israeli .NET Fight Club, a special group of .NET Insiders in Israel, many of them MVPs and community leaders. Juval's visit was sponsored by Gadi Meir, of Idag Israel. Juval spent 2 hours talking about something he usually does not address in public conferences and such, not even in his books - the issues of software development process and project management. In these two hours he presents his vision and way of work in projects he managed (when he had both an architect and a project lead role) and the things he believes bring on the best result. The outcome is "Staged Delivery" which he outlines in broad strokes, yet specific enough to gain some good understanding of the concepts behind it.

Some of the issues addressed include: Staffing, the product life cycle, component integration plan and the component life cycle, component testing, Estimation and estimation tools, Earned Value tracking and more. The talk ends 5 minutes prematurely due to technical difficulties, but let me assure you that you don't miss anything terribly important (no "surprise ending" :) )

Juval Löwy is the founder of IDesign and its Chief Architect. Juval is a seasoned software architect specializing in system architecture and large applications design. Juval helps IDesign customers design scaleable, robust, reusable, and extensible Enterprise applications, verifying that the customer has the design it takes to achieve the required quality, scalability, security, availability and throughput goals. Juval is Microsoft’s Regional Director for the Silicon Valley, working with Microsoft on on helping the industry adopt .NET. Juval also participates in the Microsoft internal design reviews for future versions of .NET. Juval is a frequent speaker at the major international software development conferences, where he talks about .NET, component-oriented design and development process. Click here for complete list of conference talks by Juval. Juval authored Programming .NET Components by O’Reilly. The book is dedicated to component-oriented programming and design using .NET, as well as the related system issues, such as remoting, threading and security. Juval also authored COM and .NET Component Services: Mastering COM+ a book which talks at length about the challenging topic of .NET Enterprise Services. Juval published numerous articles, regarding almost every aspect of developing with .NET. Click here for complete article list by Juval, as well as links to the articles. Microsoft recognized Juval as a Software Legend as one of the world top .NET experts and industry leaders.

I chatted with Ingo Rammer and Christian Weyer of the ThinkTecture team shortly after both of them had finished doing their talks about Distributed architectures at TechEd Europe. The interviews starts with Christian and we talk about web services, security and scalability. 10 minutes into the interview Ingo Rammer shows up after having been delayed a bit. The conversation turns to various architecture horror stories they've experienced during their career and a nice discussion about DOs and DONTs on distributed application scalability and worst mistakes. Some heavy .NET Architecture talk in here, is all I can say.

Ingo Rammer is co-founder of ThinkTecture. He focuses on distributed application design and development. Ingo is experienced with nearly all of Microsoft's distributed application technologies: .NET Remoting, ASP.NET Web Services, Enterprise Services, COM+, MSMQ, and infrastructure services like NLB (Network Load Balancing.) Ingo loves to focus on scalability, performance and maintainability of medium to large scale applications, and has even been contracted by Microsoft to create whitepapers detailing the performance implications of several distributed-application technologies. He regularly shares his knowledge at industry conferences, events, and seminars around the world, including TechEd, WinDev, DevWeek, NDC, VS.NET Connections, and DevDays. Ingo is the award-winning author of the book Advanced .NET Remoting, of which he currently prepares a second edition to be finished at the end of 2004. Ingo is based near Vienna, Austria.

Christian Weyer is co-founder of thinktecture. He is a recognized XML, Web Services and service-orientation expert. As a Microsoft MVP and one of the few independent German Microsoft regional directors, he has made a name for himself in the developer community. He has worked for many years with Microsoft technologies (COM/DCOM, COM+ and .NET). Christian has spoken at many well-known developer conferences and forums and is a published author, editor and writer of numerous articles for various German and international technical magazines. Visit his Weblog to find out more about Web Services and service-oriented integration and programming. Christian loves to spend time with his family and plays volleyball in his spare time. Christian is based near Frankfurt, Germany.

I chatted with Randy Miller, the guy who practically wrote MSF, for a very interesting half hour (due to technical difficulties we had to stop early). The interview revolves around MSF- the Microsoft Solution Framework for creating software processes, its origins, its main goals and benefits and how it fits in with Microsoft Team System. We also talk a little about how it compares to other processes such as the Rational Unified Process. The conversation also turns into the fascinating topic of software modeling today and the use of "Personas" to capture design requirements. more stuff: MSF vs. CMMI, empowering developers in the development process, and the future of MSF.

I chatted with Steve cook for a very interesting hour about his role in the development of UML, the concept behind software factories and domain specific languages, and the role DSLs play within Visual Studio .NET 2005. Steve even takes us on a short step by step walk through on making a simple DSL and the technical steps this entails. Steve also discusses the present and the future of Modeling as a way to design software, and later offers his own view of what software factories might look like in 10 years time. There's lots more in this packed 56 minute talk, but I'll leave you to find out all the rest...

Steve Cook works in the Enterprise Frameworks and Tools group at Microsoft, which he joined at the beginning of 2003. He is the architect responsible for the Domain Specific Language Tools. Previously he was a Distinguished Engineer at IBM. He has worked in the IT industry for 30 years, as architect, programmer, author, consultant and teacher. He was one of the first people to introduce object-oriented programming into the UK, and has concentrated on languages, methods and tools for modeling since the early 1990s. He is a member of the Editorial Board of the Software and Systems Modeling Journal, a Fellow of the British Computer Society, and holds an Honorary Doctor of Science degree from De Montford University.

Brian Noyes -Getting Technical about .NET (April 25, 2005)

What would you do if you had an experienced architect and consultant sitting right next to you? You'd start asking him all kinds of questions that have been bothering you, of course. Which is exactly what I did, which turned into a wonderful almost 2 and a half hour conversation about lots and lots of things in the .NET world. Starting with .NET 2.0 - the new table adapters, datasets and performance, enterprise library, Indigo, and continuing with architecture best practices, MSMQ, Service oriented architecture and lots more.

Brian Noyesis a Microsoft MVP and an international speaker, trainer, writer and consultant with IDesign. He speaks at Microsoft TechEd US, Europe, and Malaysia, Visual Studio Connections, SDC Netherlands, DevTeach Montreal, VSLive!, DevEssentials, and other conferences, and is one of the top rated speakers on the INETA Speakers Bureau. He has published numerous articles on .NET development for MSDN Magazine, CoDe Magazine, The Server Side .NET, Visual Studio Magazine, asp.netPRO, .NET Developer's Journal, and other publications. Brian latest book, Data Binding with Windows Forms 2.0, part of the Addison-Wesley .NET Development Series, will hit the shelves in the fall of 2005, followed shortly thereafter by Essential ClickOnce, Automatic Deployment and Update of Smart Client Applications with .NET 2.0. Brian’s blog can be found at http://www.softinsight.com/bnoyes/.

Roy Osherove Discusses the concepts behind Software factories, why they might present an alternative to today's software development techniques and how we can use the various tools that will be provided by Microsoft's domain specific language tools to create our own software factories in the IDE. Roy also discusses the various items that exist today that might be called software factories and the challenges along the way to making this happen on a large scale.

Roy Talks with Kieran Mockford, the program manager for MSBuild, Microsoft's brand new build tool offering. Kieran spills the beans that MSBuild was developed using Test Driven Development methodologies with tools such as NUnit. Kieran tells about the various problems and solutions they encountered trying to learn TDD, then the talk moves to MSBuild and the need for "real" incremental build abilities and the Microsoft internal build process. It's a Fascinating look behind the scenes of Microsoft's internal tools for source control and continuous integration automation tools.

Roy Talks with Charlie Poole, the lead developer of NUnit on various Agile topics. These include Upcoming NUnit features, Test Driven Development best practices, implementing XP in an organization, testing GUIs, threads, mock objects and much much more. Charlie also spills the beans about the upcoming NUnit blogs.

Charlie has spent more than 30 years as a software developer, designer, project manager, trainer and coach. He works through his own company, Poole Consulting, in the US and recently joined Dublin-based Exoftware to provide mentoring and training to clients in Europe.

Roy Talks with Juval Lowy, the principal of IDesign and one of the industry's leading software architects. The topics include: Project management and the IDesign process, staged delivery and what's missing in today's Agile methdologies, the makings of a good software architect, details about his upcoming book and on the one to follow after that, the future of modeling tools, Longhorn, Indigo, SOA and interoperability and more. The interview also takes a more personal tone when Juval talks about his strategy for managing his busy schedule, how IDesign came to be and the people working there, the biggest mistake he's done and more tidbits. A feature packed 73 minute interview, is all I can say.

Roy Talks with Natty Gur - An independent software consultant specializing in Enterprise architecture - in the organizational level. In this interview we'll explore what organizational architecture really means and why its needed. More topics in the interview include Natty's open source project, NWAF, Service oriented architecture, organizational patterns such as TOGAF and DODAF, the problems with layered architecture (N-Tier), Agile development, learning from past mistakes and Naked objects. Good stuff.

Roy Osherove speaks with Johanna Rothman about everyday problems in project management, software delivery and the hiring of technical people. They discuss interviewing strategies, and some bad examples of interviewing technique. Also: How do I improve myself as a project manager?. How do I deal with unrealistic project deadlines? What's wrong with running multiple projects at the same time? What is the most common management mistake?

Then, the topic shifts to the problems of project management as Johanna tries to answer a tough question such as, "What is the greatest mistake you see project managers do most often?" which leads into an interesting discussion about multi-projecting and why it can pose a problem for your projects. Also, more interesting advice from Johanna emerges when asked to give advice for new team-leaders/managers. Johanna also talks about her new book: Hiring The Best Knowledge Workers, Techies & Nerds. And why she wrote it in the first place. To finish it all off Johanna answers one of the questions each project manager should ask themselves every once in a while: "What is the worst mistake you’ve done as a manager?"